AIDING AND COMFORTING INSURRECTIONISTS

Let me tell you what happened yesterday, because the newspapers are going to bury the lede under seventeen paragraphs of procedural throat-clearing, and someone has to say the ugly thing out loud.

The Justice Department of the United States of America walked into federal court and asked a judge to erase the convictions of men who committed seditious conspiracy against this country.

Not the sentences. They already gutted those. The convictions. The jury verdicts. The legal record that any of it happened at all.

Gone. Because the president they tried to keep in power is back in power. And now he’s handing the keys to the kingdom back to the men who beat cops with flagpoles to get him there.

Let’s be precise about what seditious conspiracy means, since the word is about to vanish from the official record.

It means you didn’t just show up. It means a jury of twelve Americans heard the evidence — the encrypted messages, the operational planning, the coordinated breach — and concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that these men organized a violent plot to stop the transfer of power.

Not a protest. Not a rally that got rowdy. A plot. Those are not my words. Those are the words the Justice Department used when it was still pretending to be the Justice Department.

Now Jeanine Pirro has put her name on a filing that calls erasing those verdicts ”in the interests of justice.”

Jeanine. Pirro.

Here’s the detail every outlet has mentioned and none of them have sat with:

When a conviction is vacated — not pardoned, vacated — the collateral consequences disappear with it. The felon label. The restrictions.

The gun rights.

These men get their firearms back.

The men who smashed Capitol windows with stolen riot shields. Who led coordinated breaches through police lines. Who prosecutors said “participated in every consequential breach at the Capitol.” Who were sentenced to 15, 17, 18 years in federal prison because what they did was that serious.

They get their guns back.

If you’re not sitting with the specific, physical horror of that, sit with it now.

And while you’re sitting there, let me tell you about the other Jan. 6 defendants. The ones Trump called patriots when he handed them pardons on Day One.

One of them just got four years for an “enormous” child pornography collection.

One of them is serving life for molesting children under twelve.

One of them is about to plead guilty to child exploitation involving multiple victims — including a child under twelve.

These are the people for whom the United States government has spent sixteen months systematically dismantling its own legal infrastructure. Conviction by conviction. Record by record. Until the marble is clean and the windows are unbroken and none of it ever happened.

The Constitution has language for this moment. It’s not buried in a footnote. It’s sitting right there in Article III, plain as a punch in the face:

Aid and Comfort.

You don’t have to be the one who threw the punch. You just have to make things easier for the people who did. You just have to hand them back their guns, their clean records, their status as victims of a “weaponized” Justice Department, and send them back out into the country armed and legally laundered and hungry.

That is what is happening.

That is what Jeanine Pirro’s signature means.

That is what “interests of justice” means when the man who benefited from the insurrection is the man now running the Justice Department.

I’ve tried to be precise in these pages. I’ve tried not to reach for the apocalyptic framing when the facts don’t warrant it.

The facts warrant it.

This is not a political dispute. This is not a controversy. This is a government giving aid and comfort to the men who tried to destroy it — openly, in court filings, under the seal of the United States — while the men they pardoned rape children and the record is quietly shredded behind them.

The Constitution has a word for all of this.

We have been too polite to use it.

That ends now.

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